The Pentagon has missed its original May deadline to release the request for bids for its controversial multi-billion dollar, single award cloud computing contract.
Department of Defense spokesperson Dana White said at a Thursday press conference officials are still working on the final Request for Proposals for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract and that there is no timeline for its release.
“We are working on it, but it’s important that we don’t rush toward failure. This is different for us. We have a lot more players in it. This is something different from some of our other acquisition programs because we do have a great deal of commercial interest,” White said. “So I don’t have a timeline on it, but we are moving, and we also want to take in all of the different stakeholders and consider how we move best forward.”
The JEDI contract has received pushback from industry for the single-award nature of the large contract potentially making it designed for companies such as Amazon Web Services, which is part of Internet retail giant Amazon [AMZN].
DoD officials posted the second draft version of the JEDI RFP in April, in which it confirmed the contract starts with a two-year single award contract, with potential eight one-year follow up options.
White did not comment when asked if the delayed final RFP will result in DoD pushing back the original September deadline to award a contract.
The Pentagon posted draft price scenarios for JEDI on Friday, with comments from industry due by June 6.
A Thursday release from the Government Accountability Office also upheld a protest from technology company Oracle [ORCL] against a recent contract awarded to REAN Cloud to assist U.S. Transportation Command with cloud migration efforts.
The original REAN Cloud contract was worth $950 million, but was then reduced to $65 million in April and adjusted to only cover TRANSCOM cloud efforts. The original contract, awarded as an Other Transaction Authority production contract, was expected to assist several Pentagon components with cloud migration.
GAO officials said the OTA executed by the Army failed to comply with statutory preconditions and have ordered the deal to be terminated.
REAN Cloud is a partner of Amazon Web Services.